Cubans Awaiting Deportation Crowd U.s. Prisons To Crisis Point

ATLANTA — The increasing number of Cubans imprisoned indefinitely by U.S. immigration officials to await deportation is exacting a growing toll on the government and the prisoners.

At the federal penitentiary in Atlanta, where 1,860 of these Cubans are held, crowding and violence are so severe that a congressman who oversees federal prisons said the Cubans were being kept ''like animals in cages.''

Because the Federal Bureau of Prisons has no more room for Cubans in the Atlanta prison, the Immigration and Naturalization Service has scrambled to find space for another 700 in other jails and prisons, and officials say the cost is rising steadily.

The imprisoned Cubans were among more than 125,000 who arrived in Florida in 1980 from the Cuban fishing port of Mariel. A group of dangerous criminals and mentally incompetent people were ruled ineligible for immigration and detained when they arrived, and others have since been convicted of violating American laws. They are being held while awaiting deportation, but Cuba refuses to take them back.

The situation facing immigration officials has worsened since last May, when Fidel Castro, the Cuban leader, abruptly canceled a 5-month-old agreement to take back more than 2,700 of the men. Castro said he was protesting the Reagan administration's decision to begin beaming into Cuba propaganda broadcasts from a new government radio service, Radio Marti.

At that time only 201 men had been returned to Havana under the agreement, which also sought to normalize immigration from Cuba to the United States.

Most of the other Mariel emigres have adjusted peaceably to American society, but those who have been arrested across the country for crimes or violations of immigration laws are being added at the rate of 80 a month to swollen federal detention rolls.

Since they rioted 16 months ago in the Atlanta penitentiary, which has been turned over almost entirely to the detention of Cubans, most of the Cubans there have been locked for 23 hours a day in cells that hold up to eight inmates each.

According to prison reports, there have been 9 homicides, 7 suicides, 400 serious but unsuccessful suicide attempts and more than 2,000 serious incidents of self-mutilation since 1981 among Cubans detained in the prison.

Prison officials say the nature of the imprisoned men, rather than the conditions of their imprisonment, is responsible for the violence.